One of the things noticeably absent from Apple’s iPhone event today was Facebook. After all, other outlets were reporting that they would for sure be a part of the event. Late last week, we reported hearing that could be the case, but that the two sides were still talking and that Facebook had a back-up plan just in case Apple didn’t give them the go ahead. And for good reason.
We’ve heard from a source that sometime late last night, Facebook was told that they would not be a part of Apple’s event today. This is nothing new. Companies are told to prepare to go on stage at these events all the time only to get pulled at the last second. It’s just a bit odd that a company as large as Facebook was passed over.
Instead, look for Facebook to send out invites to their own mobile-themed event sometime very soon. Again, both their HTML5 mobile platform (aka “Spartan“) and the iPad app are ready to go — in fact, the documentation for Spartan was briefly live on the web late last week. And well, we’ve seen the iPad app before.
This all reminds me a bit of the Nuance/Siri situation. In the months leading up to WWDC this year, we reported on a deal reached between Apple and Nuance to deliver voice technology to the iPhone by way of Siri. We also reported that a key ingredient to this was the use of Nuance technology on Apple’s servers. But at WWDC, there was no mention of any of this.
Turns out, Apple decided to make it an iPhone 4S feature. And sure enough, today we saw the launch of the new Siri app integrated into iOS.
Just because something is not shown on stage at an Apple event doesn’t mean it’s not coming. It just means that it didn’t make the cut for one reason or another. Stay tuned.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the...
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